You Don't Know Me
by Deep Forest Green
Summary: "You'll never, ever know the one who loves you so, 'cause you don't know me." -Cindy Walker. Three times Éponine took the opportunity to bare her heart to Marius. Each chapter is set on a different timeline. Rated T just in case.
1. Introduction

**Disclaimer: Don't own, don't profit. This fic is for entertainment purposes only.**

**A/N: Oh my God, people. I totally meant to post this first, but I made a dumb mistake and posted the WRONG THING! Oh well. At least you got a little preview. And you'll see the rest again soon. **

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**Prologue **

Éponine could pinpoint the exact moment when she fell in love with Marius Pontmercy. That gold louis he had given her was like manna from heaven. Even then, she'd known he would never return her feelings, but foolishly she fell in love anyway. She knew why it wouldn't be returned, and it wasn't just because of the class difference. Men like Marius loved the chase, and Cosette was the chase. It was as simple as that. She made him feel important, powerful, like they were the center of the world. If there was no chase, there was no reason, no object for his affection. She, Éponine, was too easy, too close, too desperate, to be exciting for him.

The love Éponine had for Marius, it wasn't the kind of love you could tell people about. Oh no. It was the kind of love you kept to yourself at all costs, the way you would an imaginary friend. If you told anyone, they'd call you crazy. So you just sat on it, day after day, poring over it with your imagination.

But what if you did act on it? What if one day, you were so desperate that you found the nerve to do what you never thought you could? Éponine, for one, could never stop wondering what might have been. And, though he never admitted it, neither could Marius.


	2. Chapter 1

**A/N: I really have no business writing this story right now. For one thing, I have two other stories that I should be working on instead, and that I haven't updated in weeks. For another, RL just got super busy this week and I have to catch up! But the truth is, I already wrote most of this, and was just looking for the right time to post it. So post it I shall.**

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**February 1832, Gorbeau House**

"Éponine, I have a very important task for you," said Marius seriously. They were standing in front of the door to his apartment, and the chilly late-winter breeze pierced her bare shoulders as she watched the old man and his daughter leave the tenement building. "Find that girl for me, find out where she lives. As soon as possible." Had he been listening to the Jondrette's conversation instead of talking to Éponine, he would have known about the planned robbery and known to caution his liaison against her father discovering the girl's whereabouts as well. But he wasn't, so he didn't.

Éponine cast her eyes downward sadly. "Which girl? You mean the bourgeois one who just came by?" She shuffled her feet, looking for any loophole that might tell her that what she feared was not the case.

"Is there another girl?" Marius said, growing impatient with Éponine's seeming incompetence. "Her name is Ursule F. As far as I can tell, she and her father live alone together. She never goes anywhere without him. Be wary of the old man- he's very protective of her and he's already suspicious of me."

"I can't," said Éponine.

Marius scowled. "Why not?"

"Because I'm in love with you."

Marius was so shocked that he dropped the coins in his hand. Instinctively, Éponine reached down to scoop them up, then looked back up in shame at him. He did not try to take them back, but instead laughed drily. "You barely even know me, Éponine," he said.

"You don't know Ursule, and you're in love with her," she pointed out bluntly.

"That's different," Marius insisted. "That was love at first sight. I could swear we both felt something that day, the world opening up like a flower in full bloom- "

"It was love at first sight for me too," Éponine confessed. Before he could object further, she pulled him in and kissed him as hard as she could. Her lips were rough and dry on his smooth, moist ones, and he felt almost as if she were a vampire sucking away his youth and beauty.

"That was your first kiss," she said slowly in self-satisfaction, pulling away from him with a smile. "That will always be your first kiss."

"Éponine, give it up," he demanded. "It's never going to happen. What part of 'I don't love you, I'm in love with Ursule' don't you understand?"

"All of it," said Éponine, pulling him in for another kiss.

"Give me back my money or I'll report you to the police," Marius ordered her.

"Bitch, what's taking you so long?" Jondrette reminded Éponine, poking his head through his door. "Get back in here, we have things to discuss." He smiled awkwardly and waved at Marius. "Hello, m'sieur, how do you do?"

"Can't you control your own daughter?" Marius demanded, staring at him angrily.

"Apparently not," Jondrette snarled, more to himself. "Girl, if you don't get away from that bourgeois in ten seconds- "

"It's all right, Monsieur, you don't have to punish her," Marius said abruptly. "She's done nothing wrong. In fact, she's poised to earn a great deal of money, with this deal she was just about to accept."

Éponine glared at Marius with equal parts gratitude and hatred. On the one hand, he had just saved her from a savage beating, when he had no good reason to do so and could by all rights have had her arrested. On the other hand, there was a terrible price to pay for this mercy- and he hadn't even given her a choice in whether or not she would pay it. And now, because he had revealed the transaction to her father, she would be forced to give it all to him.

"That's right, Papa," said Éponine, picking up the coins she had sort of just stolen and showing them to her father. "I'm off to find a girl for M'sieur Pontmercy, and I'll make a pretty penny for the deed- just look at that."

"Not tonight you won't," said Jondrette firmly. "You're needed here."

"What for?" Marius asked, growing suspicious.

Éponine was just as confused as he was; her father had never discouraged a money-making opportunity before. "It's that bourgeois girl who just left," she added hastily to her father, deflecting Marius' question.

"Well, that won't be necessary," said Jondrette. "She and her father should be coming back here in a few hours to give us that money he promised us. Even if it's just the father who comes back, we'll be able to secure our friend Pontmercy their home address."

Marius felt a sickening feeling growing inside his stomach. Was his neighbor planning to rob the father of the girl of his dreams?

"I'll give you two a moment alone," Jondrette continued slyly, winking and pulling back into his apartment. "I'm sure you have business to discuss."

"Éponine, is this what it looks like?" Marius whispered nervously, suspiciously, when he thought Jondrette was out of earshot.

"Take me away from this," Éponine rasped as seductively as she could, fondling his shoulders. "Marry me and we'll never come back here again."

"You know that can never be," said Marius sternly, pushing her away. "Now I need to know: what exactly is it that your father is planning?"

"I don't know," said Éponine. "All I know is that I need you, and I love you, and I want you more than anything in the world. Please, I'd do anything for you!"

"You don't really love me," Marius told her. "You don't even know me. You just want someone- or something- to get you out of this horrid place, and I can't blame you. I imagine I'd want the same thing if I were in your shoes. But it's not me. Can't you see that, Éponine? I can barely take care of myself!"

He stormed out of the house, and it was only when he was out on the street that he realized that he was going to the police station to report a robbery. Meanwhile, Éponine was realizing that she had enough money and enough time to go sneak out and buy herself a loaf of bread before her father would notice that she was gone. There came a point at which stealing just wasn't fun anymore.


	3. Chapter 2

**April 1832, Jardin d'Alouette - near the cathedral **

"Hey there, M'sieur, did you miss me?"

"Éponine," said Marius, belatedly remembering the girl's name as she approached the bench where he was sitting, waiting for Cosette. "Where have you been? I haven't seen you in... two months."

"I was in prison," she said matter-of-factly, her voice slightly less raspy due to her forced withdrawal from hard liquor. "Just got released this morning. Aiding and abetting a robbery, they say I did. But they couldn't prove nothing on me and Azelma. So here I am, M'sieur Pontmercy, at your service."

"I have an errand for you," said Marius, getting up urgently. "The girl has moved again, she and her father, and I haven't seen them in months. I need you to find out where they're living and tell me."

"I know where your true love is," said Éponine, a suggestive grin creeping onto her face.

"Really?! Where?"

"She's been right here all along." She grabbed his cravat so tightly that he thought he would suffocate, kissing him in front of anyone who might be passing by. He blushed deeply, ashamed that the cathedral he had associated with his father and Mabeuf was now the place where he had been unfaithful to Cosette.

Marius pulled himself away, wiping off his face. "If you cannot control your urges long enough to accomplish a simple task, then I will find someone who can!" he shouted.

Tears welled up in Éponine's eyes. She felt as if she had been stabbed in the stomach and left to bleed. Marius didn't need her anymore. He never had. She was disposable, and always had been.

There comes a point for everyone, growing up, when they realize that without them, the world will go on much as it does. Taken to the extreme, this realization may prompt a willingness or even a desire to die. That is what happened on that day to Éponine. As long as she kept Marius at a safe distance, she could keep herself safe from rejection by telling herself that he would wake up and want her just as soon as he turned around. Why had she been so foolish as to destroy that illusion? It was all she had. Now, she had to focus on undoing the damage she had already done. If she hurried, there was still time.

_I'm so foolish. I've made a horrible mistake. Why did I tell Monsieur Marius where Cosette lives? I was so eager to see a smile light up his face, to make him notice me, that I have led him to another woman, a woman with whom I cannot compete. Now I must correct this error as soon as possible. It may be too late to make him fall in love with me, but it is not too late to stop him from being with Cosette. I will make sure she never knows his name. I will make sure that my name is the one that goes through his mind in his final moments. I am a Thénardier and a Thénardier does not give up. We always have a backup plan, and we don't take no for an answer._

With that thought in her mind, she scurried away, reached into her pocket for some charcoal and began scribbling furiously. Éponine had never been so glad to be a Thénardier.


	4. Chapter 3

**June 4, 1832, Rue Plumet**

"I love you."

She just blurted it out, without thinking. It was at the worst possible moment, when he had just given her a letter addressed to another girl. This wasn't how she had planned on telling him. She didn't know if she had been planning on telling him at all. She had been dropping hints for months, years, she had lost track now, but for some reason he had always been blind. Now, it was all out in the open, and there was silence. Silence from her, silence from Marius. Silence and shock at her boldness.

He cast his eyes downward in shame. "Just give it to her... please," he whispered. Then he disappeared down the street as fast as his legs would carry him, without a backward glance.

Éponine collapsed to the ground sobbing. She had never sobbed so hard in her life, not even when her father or Montparnasse beat her or when she had gone to jail. What a fool she had been to tell him how she felt with so little grace, in the midst of his infatuation with Cosette! She had ruined everything. Now she knew why it was better for women to hold their peace. Marius would hate her forever now, she was sure of it. She couldn't bear for Marius to hate her. But there was still one thing she could do...

She tore off a tiny corner of the letter and began to scratch a message onto it. If there was a God, Cosette's father would find it, and the one thing standing between her and Marius would be gone forever.

Suddenly Marius returned, running back down the cobblestones, and Éponine hastily shoved the slip of paper into her pocket. Why on earth was he coming back? Were her eyes playing tricks on her? Her heart pounded against her ribs as she waited expectantly for him to take her into his arms. But instead he held her at a distance and began to speak.

"Éponine, don't you get it? I do know how you feel about me, and have known for some time. It's because I know that I sent you to find Cosette for me. I thought maybe it would be a gentle way to tell you that I don't love you. You'll get over me, Éponine. Because the truth is, we're just not right for each other. I hate to have to tell you this way, but I thought you deserved to know the truth. You've been a good friend."

_But I haven't been a good friend, _Éponine thought sadly, looking down at her feet. _I've conspired to get you killed on the barricade. What worse kind of false friend can there be? I've betrayed you. You think there's no honor among thieves, but you'll never find a group of friends more loyal to each other than Patron-Minette. I'm even worse than Papa._

For the first time, Marius really looked at Éponine, trying to read her gaunt and grimy face. He thought he saw a vague sense of guilt, but couldn't imagine why she would be feeling guilty. After all, it was he who had put her in this position. Pushing back his natural disgust and inhibitions, he touched her sharp, bony shoulder and held his fleshy hand there as long as he dared.

"It's not fair, Éponine," he told her. "I wish I could apologize for not finding my way to loving you. But to be honest, I don't regret one single moment that I spent with Cosette. I'm sorry if that's not what you want to hear, but it's the truth." And with that, he left again, this time for good.


	5. Epilogue

**Several Years Later**

Sometimes Marius thought back to Éponine, the girl he had never found his way to loving while she was still alive. He felt guilty for these thoughts, considering the happy life he had with Cosette. But he would feel even guiltier if he didn't. After all, he was one of the few people in the world who remembered her at all. He didn't think her father would keep her memory alive, so that just left him.

He knew why he hadn't loved her; that was no mystery to him. But that didn't mean that he shouldn't have- or even that he couldn't have.

He didn't imagine that Éponine could have comforted him after the barricade fell the way Cosette did. Cosette had behaved like an angel from heaven, and Marius couldn't have asked for better care during his recovery. He knew he wasn't a very comforting person himself, but when Éponine was bleeding to death from a bullet she had taken for him, he had been exactly what she needed. He had never felt just so needed by anyone, so completely depended upon for everything. He could still feel her bony hands clutching the rims of his suit coat, fearing he would slip away from her in her final moments. He remembered her still-warm skin under his lips as he kissed her rough, dirty forehead in a soft goodbye.

Cosette still comforted him from time to time. But it wasn't the same. He was a father now, and his three young children took up most of his life. Looking into their eyes, he knew that if need be, he would make the same sacrifices for them that his own father had made for him. Now he understood how Jean Valjean had felt, not being able to share his past with the people he loved most. But that was the burden of men. Part of him felt that he just wasn't cut out to be a father.

And what of Éponine? She was but a ghost now; she had no place in the lives of Marius and Cosette. She never had. Just a wisp, a foggy presence that had surely been born once and then died. Nothing of her or her family remained in France; her father had made sure of that. All evidence that she had ever existed, it was gone, swept away as the Gorbeau House was demolished along with the other old tenement buildings in Saint Michel to make way for the wider streets that were being constructed as part of the Industrial Revolution. Sometimes Marius barely recognized the city that he knew and loved; he was haunted by it, but he knew he could never live anywhere else.

As Marius' republican sympathies increased, so did his thoughts of Éponine. He realized, belatedly, that she was exactly the kind of person his friends had been fighting for. No girl should have to marry a baron in order to escape her sad lot in life. But Éponine had clung to that hope because it was her only option, fooling herself into thinking she loved him when she actually didn't. He couldn't condemn her for loving a shadow; he had done the same. The only difference was that Cosette turned out to be perfect and he was not; that was why Marius had gotten a happy ending and Éponine was not so lucky.

But on the other hand, maybe Éponine's love had been truer simply because he hadn't been trying to make her fall in love with him. Maybe she had loved "the real" him long before Cosette had, seeking him out instead of him having to follow her. Maybe he had allowed himself to be more honest with Éponine than he had with Cosette, even though the former was of a much lower status.

In a way, he almost didn't blame her for trying to separate him from Cosette. Had he been in her situation, he knew he would have done the same thing. Like her, he was jealous and possessive, and he thought of Cosette as his long before he knew that she returned his affections. He had been ready to die for his love affair, however foolish and fruitless it may have been. Once again, though, fate had intervened on his behalf. A Baron could afford to be a romantic.

Sometimes, late at night, he would try to draw her from memory. He was by no means an artist, but since Éponine had missed the dawning of the daguerrotype by seven years, he wanted to see that her image was not forgotten. He tried to draw her the way she had appeared when she had met him outside the cathedral- poorer and prettier. He started with the outline, the general shape of her body; then the clothing, and then the face. The face was by far the hardest part. For the body and clothes he could manage vague scratches of the pen to indicate wretchedness. But the face was quite complicated. He could never recapture the animalistic glow in her eyes, the intensity of her stare, the pointed jaw so different from Cosette's. At the bottom, he scrawled the name _Éponine Pontmercy_. Just to see how it looked. Probably the kind of thing she had done while she was alive, he mused.

Whenever Cosette walked into the room, he stuffed the drawings into the top drawer of his desk. He felt as though he were committing adultery. Although he never drew Éponine in a romantic or sexual light, he knew well that his actions might well be interpreted that way. His drawings were those of a police sketch artist trying to recreate the face of a suspect from a description, not those of a heartbroken lover. It would do no good to romanticize Éponine and what she had been through. He drew her, misery and all.

_You can't do this, _he told himself. _You can't fall in love with a dead girl you never really knew in the first place. Not when you have a living wife who loves you. _

But, stranger things had happened to him.

Éponine was his escape now, when before he had been hers. Whenever he needed to step away from his life with Cosette and their children, he imagined her bony frame appearing in the doorway, carrying a book under its arm. He even missed the way she had eaten a slice of bread in his room and started fiddling with her hair in front of his mirror. Cosette never did frivolous things like that anymore. Marius missed the childlike, carefree part of her so much. He kept waiting for it to come back after her father died, but it never did.

Éponine had never known marriage or motherhood, nor the loss of a beloved family member. No one would ever know what she would have been like as a wife or mother, and thus her spirit was untainted with such roles. Marius could only imagine the way she would have awoken him in the morning, the way she would have tried on her dresses and eaten her food, the way she would have embarrassed him with her awkward transition into the life of a Baronne. It was amusing to think about. But it was also quite sad. If only she could have held out a few months longer, she would now be only an ocean away, and not an entire lifetime.**  
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She had been foolish to fall in love with him. But he was grateful that she had.

Some nights he lay awake on his bed and stared up at the ceiling. His body was splayed out over the mattress, as if he were gazing at the stars. "I'm ready now, Éponine," he whispered.

But she didn't hear him.

**Fin**


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